Not Much of a Hero
by Sand-wolf579
Summary: After Mick betrayed the team Ray wandered down the halls of the Waverider and wondered why things had gone so wrong. He couldn't help but think that maybe Mick wasn't the only one to blame.


**A/N: Am I the only one that's so pissed off about how Mick's been treated all season? It just saddens me how unfairly the rest of the team treats him. Especially in the Fellowship of the Spear episode. I'm not kidding, after I watched the episode my mom actually asked me what was wrong. Just by** _ **looking**_ **at me she could tell that something was really bothering me. Anyways, I have ranted to my siblings enough times about Mick to make their ears bleed, so I decided to put my feelings into writing. So here it is, a short story centered around the thoughts of the** _ **one**_ **redeemable Legend.**

 **And if I owned Legends of Tomorrow, or any of the Arrowverse shows, would I seriously make any of the characters as narrow minded as they are?**

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Things were quiet on the Waverider. Everybody was too shocked or angry to be doing something, and even if they weren't what would they do? None of them knew where the Legion of Doom had gone. And there really wasn't any point in stopping time aberrations when there was a very high chance that the Legion would be rewriting reality any second now, and there was nothing they could do about it.

The Legion of Doom, the bad guys, had won. The good guys had lost. And now there was nothing they could do but wait for everything to go to hell, and when it did, would they even realize it?

Most all of the Legends were thinking and feeling the exact same thing. This was all Mick's fault. He had betrayed them, stabbed them in the back, and just left. They should have known that something like this would happen. The man was a criminal, a thief, and they should never have trusted him. The problem was, they _had_ trusted him, and now everything was ruined because of it.

Only one Legend believed the opposite. That they should have trusted him for a long time now, but they hadn't, and _that_ was why things had gone so wrong.

Ray walked down the hallways of the Waverider alone, his chest twisted up with so many feelings that it hurt. Of course, he felt betrayed just as much as everybody else did, if not more so because _unlike_ everybody else Ray liked to think that he and Mick had been more than teammates, and that they had been friends.

If that really _had_ been the case though, then Ray was beginning to think that he was a sorry excuse for a friend.

Ray also felt really angry, which was not an emotion that he liked feeling very much. He was angry at Mick for betraying them. Angry at Leonard for _convincing_ him to betray them. He was absolutely furious with the Legion of Doom for stooping so low as to bring Leonard onto their team in the first place.

Ray was also really mad at the rest of his team, for not realizing that Mick hadn't done this out of the blow. They were supposed to be a team, a _family,_ and they all still treated Mick like he was nothing more than a criminal. It almost made sense that Mick would leave the team, because why would he want to stay around people who made it clear that they didn't like him. If somebody is treated as an outcast for too long, chances were they were going to cut their loses and just leave the situation altogether.

More than anything else though Ray was mad at and disappointed in himself. He should have been a better teammate, a better friend. Maybe then, none of this would have ever happened. Maybe then Mick wouldn't have felt the need to join the Legion to fix his screwed up life. Ray had known that Mick felt like an outcast, he certainly talked about it enough, but he hadn't known just how deep that feeling had gone.

...no, that was a lie. Even before Mick's betrayal Ray had realized that he didn't feel like he belonged on the team. Ray just hadn't _wanted_ to see it, so he pretended that he didn't. Now though, Ray had no choice but to admit that he had noticed all the times where somebody on the team had insulted Mick's intelligence, or questioned his morality. Heck, there had even been a time or two where they had all fought over whose turn it was to keep an eye on Mick, to basically babysit him like he was some troublemaking kid instead of the grown adult that he was.

They hadn't trusted him, they definitely hadn't liked him, so was it really all that much of a shock that he had betrayed them for the chance at a better life? The chance to get his partner back. And the chance to be treated like an actual human being instead of some wild animal that was just a source of inconvenience and had to be controlled.

If the situations had been switched, wouldn't any of the rest of them have done the exact same thing? In fact, some of them _had_ almost done it. Amaya had been pretty insistent that they should have used the spear for themselves, and Ray was pretty sure she wasn't just talking about defeating the Legion. She had been acting strange recently, and one look at Gideon's search history (yes, she had one of those) showed that somebody had recently searched for information about the fate of Amaya's family and village.

Ray wasn't surprised that Amaya had been so tempted to use the spear, and he really didn't blame her. It was a difficult temptation to overcome, and as Mick had proven, not everybody could resist its power. The thing was, Mick _had_ resisted its power, at least for a bit. He had just...given in.

And even though Ray wanted to, he really, _really_ wanted to, he couldn't really blame Mick for his decision. He had been told by his old partner that the team didn't trust him, and none of them had even thought of doing anything to show Mick otherwise. The way they had treated Mick after they had found out that he had told Leonard of their plans had probably just proved to him that Len was right.

The team had seriously screwed up, and they _still_ didn't even realize it. Everybody else was still in the bridge, talking about how badly Mick had screwed them over. Nobody was even willing to think of the possibility that maybe _they_ had screwed _him_ over first.

Ray had sat with the rest of the team for a while, but he just couldn't listen to their angry words any more. He had to get away from it. Feeling more emotionally exhausted and physically drained than he had since that whole mess with Kendra, Ray made his way towards the kitchen for a pickmeup.

He knew that there were guys who used coffee to give themselves a little extra boost of energy, or alcohol to drive away the pain, but Ray didn't use either. Coffee was okay sometimes, but it left a bitter taste in his mouth. And it smelled really weird. The same went for alcohol. Ray didn't really feel tired, emotionally or physically, very often, but when he did he counted on just one thing to help him out. Sugar.

When Ray was just a kid he discovered that munching on cookies after a bad day at school seemed to make everything seem better. When he got a little older he learned how to make his own desserts and could bake fairly well. He then found a new joy not just in making and eating desserts, but in sharing them with somebody else who was having a hard day. However bad he was feeling Ray always felt better to see somebody else cheered up even slightly because of him.

Ray had been baking more and more often since joining the Legends, though most of his teammates weren't aware of his hobby. It wasn't like he was hiding it, it just never came up. But because Gideon didn't exactly make or provide things that were actually sugary junk, Ray decided to make some for himself, and lately he had been sharing a fair amount of it with Mick, which was why he had to bake more and more often.

Not that Ray had minded though. He had felt glad that somebody enjoyed his treats, even though Mick would probably eat anything. Now though, Ray didn't have anybody to share his leftover cupcakes with...alright, that wasn't true, he actually had a whole team's worth of people to share with, but it just wasn't the same.

Ray searched through the cupboards of the kitchen for a bit before finding the last remaining cupcake. He had hidden it the night before because Mick had been in a munchy mood and Ray had just wanted to keep his last cupcake for himself. He couldn't help but wonder if Mick would still be here if he had offered him the last stinking cupcake, or if there was some other apparently miniscule thing that he could have done that would have made all the difference.

Suddenly Ray wasn't much in the mood for dessert. Still, with the cupcake in his hand he walked down the familiar hallway path from the kitchen back to Mick's room. For some reason he felt compelled to come here, and it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go.

Ray entered the room as he had dozens of times before, and it looked just the same as it had the last time he had been in here. There were dirty shoes and burned clothes strewn across the floor. Ray saw about five lighters without even looking for any. There were many tools and mechanical pieces that Mick hadn't gotten around to moving to the room on the Waverider that he had claimed for his own personal workshop. And, of course, there was Axel.

"Hey, buddy." Ray sat down at the desk and peered into the cage that the rat he had given Mick was sitting in. The rodent seemed to glare at Ray. Axel bit at anybody who tried to get near or touch him unless they were Mick, but he especially didn't seem to like Ray. Normally Ray would be offended that anybody, person or animal, didn't like him, but considering the feeling was pretty much mutual he didn't mind it.

Still, Mick had really seemed to like the rat quite a bit, and the very least Ray could do was to at least try to take care of it. Ray opened the little door at the side of the cage and quickly moved his fingers out of the way as Axel scurried out and tried to nip at him.

Axel...Right from the start Ray had been surprised by the name that Mick had chosen for his pet. Ray had expected something more like Firecracker or Spark, something fire related. Ray grimaced. Even when he was trying not to he couldn't help but think of Mick as somebody who cared about fire and nothing else.

Yeah, he was real friend material all right.

"You're lucky." Ray muttered as he watched the rat crawl off of the desk and scurry around the room looking for Mick's leftovers to eat. "You don't even know that he's gone yet." Axel would probably realize it soon enough. He may not be a very intelligent animal, but even this violent rat would eventually realize that the one person in the world that he tolerated was not coming back.

"I'm sorry." Ray muttered, partly to the rat and partly to Mick, even though he wasn't there to hear his apology. Ray got off the chair and sat cross legged on the floor. He ripped a small piece off the cupcake he was still holding and gently tossed it to Axel, who nibbled it up without a second thought. "I should have done something."

It was ironic, Ray thought, how he wanted nothing more than to be a hero, to go down in history as being somebody who did good for other people, when that was probably the last thing that he was. Ray wasn't hero material. If he was, he wouldn't have bullied Mick and talked badly about him behind his back and to his face like everybody else did. If Ray was actually a hero, he wouldn't have given up on being Mick's partner/best friend just because something better had come up.

Heroes were supposed to help people. Even if Ray did eventually save the world and become a Legend, would that make him a hero? Ray wasn't so sure anymore. Even if he ended up saving countless people's lives, where had he been when his teammate had needed him the most? He had been too caught up in himself and his own greatness, that's where he had been.

Ray was so concerned with going down in history as a hero that he had overlooked even being a decent person to those directly around him, and that wasn't okay. It was actually kind of funny. In some ways, _Mick_ was more of a hero than her was. Ray could think of countless times just in the past couple of months where Mick had ended up saving the day. From what he had heard, Mick had basically single-handedly saved George Washington's life.

" _And_ , Ray thought bitterly. _He was the first to decide to come back for me after I had become a Knight of Camelot."_ Ray had actually been really surprised when Nate had told him that, and he shouldn't have been. Mick always seemed to jump right onto the rescue bandwagon, because, according to him, they would all do the same thing for him.

 _But would we have?_ Ray wanted to say yes, but his mind kept on turning to the Revolutionary War, where Amaya and Nate had been seconds away from being too late to save Mick from getting shot, and they had only taken so long because they had wanted to spend the time getting to know each other better under the sheets.

"Wow." Ray frowned and tossed another bit up cupcake to Axel. "I thought we had all been doing better as a team, but now…" How could he have been so blind? How could he have thought that everything had been okay when the opposite was true?

"I'm sorry." Ray said to the air, because the one person he wanted to hear it was long gone. Mick may have been a criminal, but that didn't mean that he deserved to be treated like he was the lowest of the low. For goodness sakes, they were supposed to be heroes! Yet they had all belittled one of their own just because they thought he had been beneath them.

Some heroes they were.

" _I'm sorry."_

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 **A/N: I haven't actually seen the Doomworld episode yet, but I read somewhere that it is revealed that Mick's rat's name is Axel (like Trickster?). I liked the name so I decided to go with it, if I'm wrong, well, go with it anyways.**

 **And as a send off note, does anybody else here think that Mick deserves so much more love than he actually gets? I swear, that guy has it rough, and his so called 'team' hasn't been helping.**


End file.
